Digital Landfill

There are a lot of readers of this blog who get these updates via email.

Andy Sernovitz has an interesting post this week asking .  All the gibberish about RSS feeds and XML and syndication have sent most people scurrying to get blog updates via email -- which accomplishes nothing but crowd up your inbox and make you feel ever more guilty about everything that you are NOT reading.

When I first started following blogs, I used a reader that created a stream of stories based on a series of search criteria.  That tended to be a bit overwhelming in volume, especially since a story would show up multiple times as was syndicated through multiple services.  I would get way too much to look at and just stopped.

What I do now is far easier and much more useful to me.  I use (it's free).  I put the addresses of the blogs I like (about 20 or so) in the little box on the graphic.  It also suggests other ones that perhaps I haven't heard of.  Reader also has an iPhone app that is integrated with my desktop, which is quite nice.  And I just keep up with people whose ideas I find interesting.

So why do all this?  Why not just get updates through email? 

The main reason is that it helps clearly separate "business content requiring action" from "interesting reading related to my job" which for me are two very different mindsets.  With Google Reader you can easily skim a host of articles and quickly decide which ones you want to read.  If you are away from a connection for a period of time, you can just cut the nonsense and check off "mark all as read" and start over again with a blank slate.  Quickly.  The other advantage is that it is way easier to subscribe/unsubscribe in a reader than it is with email -- and you tend to be more aggressive about it and actually do it.  You don't even have to know the URL or feed address for Google Reader to find the blog -- just put the name itself in the search box.

The other thing a reader is good for is getting updates on something like InformationZen (our information sharing and network site).  You get changes in the site sent directly to the reader, also reducing the "stuff" that shows up in your email inbox.

So much as I love having you as an email subscriber, why don't you make your life easier and try reading this blogs and others in a more streamlined way?

Here are the blogs I currently follow:

AIIM Knowledge Center Blog
Alfresco Global Feed
Andy Sernovitz's Damn, I Wish I'd Thought of That!
BetterECM - russ stalters' Blog on Exploring NextGen ECM
BizTechTalk
CMS Watch Trends and Features
Conquer Information Chaos
Document Imaging talk
ECM Report
ECM Stuff
ecmarchitect.com
Email Marketing Strategy from Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey
Infonomics Magazine - Web Exclusives
Latest from AIIM
MarketingProfs Daily Fix Blog
Microsoft Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Team Blog
Pow! Right Between The Eyes! Andy Nulman's Blog About Surprise
Presentation Zen
Records and Information Management: ARMA International's InfoPro
Seth's Blog
TakingAIIM: *ECM* - From Here to Eternity
The Business Of IT
The Enterprise Content Management Blog

Just one more way of trying to get control of the .

We all spend a lot of time talking about all the new sources of information and how they influence buying decisions, especially for the next generation of workers and customers we will encounter.

Well according to this survey by Harris Interactive and reported in eMarketer (a very cool site by the way) at least in the CONSUMER context (and one can't but think it also carries over into the business context), plain old shopping and browsing is still the most popular way of getting information on new products.

Now this is an area in which I guess I am far ahead of the young.  I get almost all my information from the bottom part of the chart.  I have been to the mall roughly 8 times in the past few years.  2X to go to the Apple store.  4X to go out to dinner and/or a move.  And maybe 2X to buy something.  I guess, though, if you were to average this out on a family basis and count my wife and 16 year old daughter, our data might approach that of a US College student.

I think one thing that it does perhaps hint at in a BUSINESS context is that not ALL buying and looking, no matter how good our systems, will ever occur simply on line or in business versions of .  Or on our own InformationZen for that matter.  Rather, our on-line worlds will become PART of our strategy to connect with peers, customers, and prospects.  An increasingly important part, but one that also will still have a variety of in-person and traditional tools that augment and reinforce the messages we send and receive on-line.

Regardless of the final form the Wall Street bailout takes, one thing is certain.  There will be an awful lot of politicians of both stripes running around demanding to "take names" and to know  "exactly who knew what and when they knew it."  There are certain to also be an awful lot of lawsuits flying around.

This will be a challenging time for records and information management in the financial community.  The holes in information management practices (and we all have them) are never more evident than when crisis strikes.  Can we clearly document who knew what ... when ... and how did they know it?  The answer is often not pretty when the bright light of a courtroom or a congressional hearing shines on our internal processes. 

The other thing that often happens when crisis strikes is that mistakes are made that can often make or break a company (just ask Arthur Andersen).

All this got me thinking about a few questions from our State of the Industry survey earlier this year. 

I thought I would take a cut of the data just from the perspective of the banking and insurance industries (150 companies in all, 71% with more than 1,000 employees and 66% in the US).

So here goes.  Here are a few questions and the breakouts for the banking and insurance industries. 

My take:  With over 40% of companies reporting only marginal effectiveness in managing electronic information and over 40% reporting only marginal confidence their electronic information is "accurate, accessible, and trustworthy" clearly there are some challenging times ahead.

On a scale of 1 (TERRIBLE) to 10 (excellent), please rate the overall effectiveness of your organization in managing, controlling and utilizing electronic information.  N=150

• 43% would grade their companies as a 5 or less.
• Only 16% would grade their companies highly -- 8, 9, or 10

Imagine that your organization is sued by a former customer or constituent and must produce all the organizational information related to that person [not that this would ever happen in the current environment!]. Approximately how long do you believe that would take?  N=112

•   7% = less than one day
• 30% = less than one week
• 38% = less than one month
• 19% = one to two months
•   6% = more than 2 months

How confident are you, that if challenged, your organization could demonstrate that your electronic information is accurate, accessible, and trustworthy?  N=112

• 12% = very confident
• 25% = quite confident
• 22% = confident
• 30% = slightly confident
• 11% = not confident at all

How confident are you that emails related to documenting commitments and obligations made by you and your staff are recorded, complete, and retrievable?  N=113

• 12% = very confident
• 13% = quite confident
• 27% = confident
• 30% = slightly confident
• 18% = not confident at all

For more information, contact or . 

Quotation of the above statistics permitted with the citation "AIIM" or "www.aiim.org"

How often are you checking the markets?  Be honest.  Odds are, too often.  Up 300.  Down 300.  And over and over again.  I have thus far shown the good sense not to actually check my own 401-k.  So far.

Here are a couple of more productive things you might do.

1.  Find a New Job

If you're in the document, content, records, or business process management industry and worried about your job or actively looking for a job, check out the AIIM Job Bank.  Ditto if you're looking for good people.  Why waste a lot of time and energy on a whole lot of generic sites -- go right to one that focuses specifically on the things in which you are interested.

2.  Get Smarter

Or maybe expand your knowledge to make yourself more valuable or to better position yourself for the next gig.  Or if you are on the company side, how about investing in your own people?  You can TEST DRIVE the AIIM training program by going to the test drive link and using the special code X1YZA.  There's no charge.

3.  Get In On The Ground Floor

Get on the mailing list for our new magazine, Infonomics.  Unlike a lot of other magazines with an IT focus, this one is actually interesting -- I promise.  It actually has real people in it who are focused on driving real value for their organizations by using document, content, and records management technologies.  For now, there is NO CHARGE for this magazine if you get on the list.

4.  Do Something Productive For Lunch

How about take in a webinar?  AIIM's webinars are 88.3% infomercial-free.  YES, we do have a sponsor.  But they can only take for 7 minutes or so and then the subject matter expert takes over.  Check one out.

Webinar: Customer-focused Content Begins with Collaboration -- 9/24

Webinar: Are you Managing Your Processes, or are They Managing you? -- 9/26

Webinar: Email Management on Demand: Find Out How -- 10/08

Webinar: Digital Preservation: Challenges and Benefits -- 10/15

5.  Get Connected

Have you been to the new AIIM social networking site -- INFORMATION ZEN? 

There is no charge to sign on to the site -- and it's a great place to post those questions you always wanted to ask.  Thousands of experts to answer your questions -- a lot more productive than raising your hand at a conference.

6.  Get Even Smarter

AIIM's Market Intelligence group provides quarterly reports on key trends in the industry.  The last 4 quarter topics are pretty compelling -- Content Security, Enterprise 2.0 technologies, Search and Findability, and Business Process Management.  The downloads are FREE (lthough I will admit we are considering charging for them -- they are that good).  CLICK HERE for details.

 

Preliminary results of a new AIIM survey of companies in the document channel point to an ongoing challenge in getting the word out about companies products and solutions.

• 66% of companies describe their marketing effectiveness as "poor" or "fair"
• for 62%, the mix of advertising spend has shifted dramatically in the past few years, with web advertising now eclipsing print advertising in absolute terms.
• 37% provide no industry training at all to their sales and marketing staff.

The full survey results will be presented at AIIM's annual Document Management Service Providers Executive Forum on November 6-8 in Austin.  This is the premier event and a "must attend" for anyone who is anyone in the document and records management channel.  See http://www.aiim.org/dmsepf for details.

Jim Anderson's The Business of IT Blog (a blog I read) has an interesting series of playing off a "Wicked" theme.  One I particularly like -- likely because it resonates so close to home -- is "Wicked, Wicked IT Strategy Problems."

A few excepts are listed below highlighting "How You Know Whether You Have a Truly Wicked IT Problem?" -- check out the full post HERE.   Here's Jim's WICKED list....

1. Too Many People Are Involved: A problem that has too many people who are impacted by it starts to look like a wicked problem very quickly. Each person who has a different vested interest and is working on a different set of priorities will contribute to making a difficult problem into an unsolvable wicked one.
2. The Cause Of The Problem Is Not Clear: There is no single cause for the IT issue that you are dealing with. Generally there are multiple sources that have fed the problem including competition, issues with employees & staffing, company strengths that have become decrements, and a traditional domestic vs. international focus can also compound the problem.
3. The Problem Is Shaped Like A Blob: This is an especially tricky characteristic to deal with - the problem seems to change shape everytime you try to deal with it. This makes it hard to “get a grip” on the problem and so you may not have any idea as to where to start.
4. You’ve Never Seen Anything Like This Before: How can you solve a problem that doesn’t look like any other problem that you’ve ever seen before? When you face a problem that you’ve never seen before, the question of what tools or techniques to use to solve it becomes even more critical.
5. There Are No Signs Showing You The Right Direction: Most problems come with some sort of indication of what the correct next thing to do in order to solve it is. However, wicked problems have no such indicators. You are truly on you own here.

Do you have a truly Wicked document, content or records problem that you've overcome?  You might be a candidate for a cover story in our new magazine, INFONOMICS.  Contact the editor, to pitch your success story...

My iPhone is a curse these days.  Given how easy it is to check stocks, I find myself in the middle of all this market craziness constantly the little market icon to find out what is going on with the Dow.  It's not very healthy.

So as an antidote, here's a quick update on some things going on in the suddenly peaceful (at least relative to the markets) world of document, content, and records management.

We're about 2 months out from our annual Document Management Service Providers Executive Forum (cursed with the unfortunate acronym DIM-SPEF).  Bad acronym, but great event.  If you're in the document channel, you need to be there -- November 6-8 in Austin (hence the graphic).  You should also make sure you participate in our annual Channel survey, which will be released in Austin.  It's our usual deal for participants -- take the survey, get the results for free.  CLICK HERE to take the survey -- about 10 minutes.

We're also in the middle of our annual roadshow -- this time of year focus on the east and midwest.  CLICK HERE for dates and places.  The theme?  "Automating Document-Centric Processes -- Is SharePoint Enough?"

We've been doing a bit of research on marketing effectiveness of document, content, and records management vendors.  A couple of data points from the survey -- send me an if you'd like a copy.

• Marketers are increasingly focused on their own programs and how to leverage them.  A key criterion for selecting a 3rd party partner should be a willingness to use THEIR toolkit to support YOUR programs rather than just sell you services. 
• The centerpiece of your marketing efforts should be on getting people to your content on your web site.  A surprisingly high percentage of companies do not sponsor a user conference (38%) or a partner conference (40%).
• In general, a fairly high degree of concern exists about the effectiveness of advertising and broad trade shows.  Regional events, vertical or application focused activities, webinars, and web optimization are viewed as especially effective.
• When asked for the top tools relative to lead generation and branding, marketers cite a fairly conventional set of tools.  Our own experience suggests that one key to effectiveness is integration and leveraging of these efforts rather than just doing them because “you have always done them.” 
• While advertising ranks fairly low in the findings, the free form comments suggest that advertising can be extremely effective when viewed as part of an overall print, in-person, and on-line campaign (rather than just an ad hoc tool to get “visibility.”)  The more effective companies have advertising, including print, as a part of their portfolio.
• Marketers view market research as important, and plan to spend more on it, but don’t currently seem to be getting what they are looking for.  This is perhaps the result of both extremely high pricing on the part of traditional market research/analyst firms as well as a lack of strategic focus on ECM and related spaces. 

My friend Russ Edelman from Corridor Consulting is in the process of hitting it big time with an interesting new book -- . 

Here's what Publisher's Weekly says -- "In this winning success guide, the authors expose Nice Guy Syndrome, where the afflicted—overly selfless men and women—give away their power in the workplace and often face frustration and career derailment. While 61% of Americans believe that niceness impedes business success, the authors argue that the condition is correctable, and it is possible to succeed without resorting to aggression or excessive competitiveness...Drawing on extensive interviews with 350 business professionals and an assortment of celebrity CEOs, this well-organized and psychologically astute book excels in its presentation of a simple and encouraging message: that nice doesn't have to mean weak and that nice guys can make it to the top."

Congratulations to Russ!

 

There was a very interesting article in today's New York Times -- In Digital Age, Federal Files Blip Into Oblivion. 

The core point of the article, and one we find ourselves making over and over again as users wrestle with the in their organizations, is best captured in this quote...  This question of the electronic information and long term archiving is one that isn't going away soon.

Countless federal records are being lost to posterity because federal employees, grappling with a staggering growth in electronic records, do not regularly preserve the documents they create on government computers, send by e-mail and post on the Web.

Many federal officials admit to a haphazard approach to preserving e-mail and other electronic records of their work. Indeed, many say they are unsure what materials they are supposed to preserve.

This confusion is causing alarm among historians, archivists, librarians, Congressional investigators and watchdog groups that want to trace the decision-making process and hold federal officials accountable. With the imminent change in administrations, the concern about lost records has become more acute.

What are you doing to make sure that YOUR ORGANIZATION can document accurately WHAT you did, WHO did it, WHEN they did it, and WHY and HOW.  And not necessarily in the Perry Mason "AHA!" context of a court disclosure that wins the case.  But just in the normal context of day to day business.  Most organizations are not managing their electronic information; they are letting it mange them.

A couple of suggestions...

Check out our training programs in Electronic Records Management and E-Mail Management.

Education your bosses by directing them to our slideshow.

This issue of digital preservation typically has three components to it -- hardware, software, and people.  At least one part of the issue on the software side is our work on PDF/Archive.  We've even put together a training course to help users figure out how to implement PDF/A.

What are you waiting for? A subpoena?

Some of Harvey's perspectives on the capture software market follow.  Make sure to check out his web site for more information -- http://www.hsassocs.com. ­ Harvey knows more about the capture software market than just about anyone I know.

Paper consumption used to grow consistent with GDP; there was an inflection point in this relationship about 2002.  Now growth is becoming linked to the elimination of paper and the digitization of processes.  Capture at its core is the means by which information comes into the enterprise.  It is currently a highly fragmented market, with many vendors.  Contrary to conventional opinion, capture is not a mature market.

The overall end user capture software market in 2007 was about $1.7 billion. The market grew at a 16.8% rate between 2006 and 2007.  Harvey estimates a CAGR of 15.1% through 2011.  The top 5 vendors account for about 40% of the market.  Harvey sees these primary industry segments:  1) ad-hoc desktop, including OC; 2) batch and distributed batch processing; and 3) transaction processing and process management.  Significant growth in 2007 in the transaction processing and process management market (esp. Invoice processing, AP, and explanation of benefits applications).

Harvey thinks the traditional document channel is going to have challenges. The typical VAR is a small company selling small systems in a geographical concise area.  There are going to be scaling challenges for many companies as the size of deal rises.  In the MFP channel, manufacturers are buying distributors; direct sales are increasingly important for the future (Xerox buys Global, Oce buys Imagistics, Konica buys Danka US and Australia, Ricoh bought Danka Europe and IKON, Toshiba and Sharp buying local distributors). An implication of all of this for users is that the supplier will lead with its OWN capture software solutions.

A comment...

Harvey ultimately see the Microsoft channel, driven by SharePoint, as playing an increasingly important role and potentially replacing many traditional document channel players.   As I think about all of this and its relevance to AIIM, a thought occurs to me.  As these entrants come into the document channel, the likelihood that they actually KNOW something about the things that our community cares about (imaging, capture, records, process) decreases.  Is there a role for AIIM to play in qualifying the channel in some way ‹ at a company level, not an individual certification level ‹ so that users can have some confidence that the partner they are dealing with actually KNOWS something about imaging, capture, records, and process and not just the placement of Office files in a SharePoint repository?

Seems to me worth thinking about...

Just got this update from MarketWatch ‹ the consolidation march continues....

Open Text Corp. (OTEX: said Thursday that it will buy software company Captaris Inc. (CAPA) for $4.80 a share. The deal is valued at about $131 million. The companies expect the acquisition to close by year-end. Shares of Captaris closed Wednesday at $3.74.